Belgian teams favoured for Ardennes Classics; French teams miss out; Team Type 1 invited to both

Race organiser ASO has announced the teams that have been invited to its two Ardennes Classics, La Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, which will run on April 18th and 22nd respectively. Both races are part of the International Cycling Union (UCI) WorldTour, and so all eighteen ProTeams are automatically invited, but ASO has invited seven further Professional Continental teams to take the peloton up to the maximum of two hundred riders.

Unsurprisingly, since the races take place in Belgium, all three Belgian ProConti teams - Accent.jobs-Willems Verandas, Landbouwkrediet, and Topsport Vlaanderen-Mercator - have been invited to both. What is perhaps more surprising though, since ASO is French, is that only one French team has been invited to the two races.

Saur-Sojasun is the lucky team, which has been granted a wildcard to both Flèche and Liège, while Europcar gets an invitation to Liège only, with Colombia-Deportes taking its place in La Flèche; France’s other two ProConti teams - Cofidis and Bretagne-Schuller - have both missed out entirely.

Project 1t4i, which has missed out on so many big invitations in the past, is the fourth team which has been invited to both races, confirming its status as one of the biggest in the Professional Continental division. The fifth is Team Type 1-Sanofi; the American team, which rides to raise awareness of Type 1 Diabetes, and features a number of riders that suffer with the condition, is finding itself popular with race organisers this year and will ride both Ardennes Classics for the first time.

Both races were won by Philippe Gilbert (then Omega Pharma-Lotto, now BMC Racing) as he went to become only the second rider in history to take the Ardennes triple, with his earlier victory in the Amstel Gold Race.